• Why do some of your power cables have lumps?
What are the black dots on your car's windshield for?
Here are the answers to those questions, and a bunch of other things you see all the time
that have incredible uses.
10 – Holes at the top of running shoes • If you own a pair of running shoes, there's
a pretty good chance you have some loops at the tops of your shoes that you're not using
for laces.
• And if you've tried to use them for laces, you've probably found them pretty uncomfortable.
• That's because there is more than one way to lace your shoes.
Most of us simply use the standard criss-cross pattern, and that's good enough.
• But it is possible to lace your shoes to make them still fit right, but give more
support to your toes or your instep.
The extra holes on your shoes are there to accommodate lacing methods you've probably
never ever seen before.
9 – Silica gel packets • You probably know silica gel as the little
rectangular package that tells you not to eat it.
It comes in everything from shoes to beef jerky, but do you know why?
• Silica gel is effective at absorbing excess moisture.
So it frequently gets packaged in with things that need to stay dry over time.
• And they stay good for a long time, so you can actually save and re-use them.
Put a packet in with some old books or anything else you need to keep dry, and it will help
keep it from building up excess moisture.
8 – Pom-poms on hats • Today, the little pom-pom at the top of
your knit cap serves little purpose but to look nice.
• They became popular in the 1930s as a way to cheaply decorate clothing during the
Great Depression.
They were easy to assemble and attach, and could be made with scrap yarn, so they quickly
became popular and fashionable.
• But these things have been around for hundreds of years.
• In Napoleon's army, each soldier's hat was adorned with a different color pom-pom
to show his rank and company.
• In some South American cultures, different colored pom-poms are used on traditional garments
to show a person's marital status.
• And in Rome, clergymen would use different colors to signify the order of each member.
7 – Rivets in denim • Perhaps the first thing we should cover
here is that those little metal buttons all over your jeans?
Those are called “rivets.”
• And they're the reason your jeans don't rip apart more often.
• Those rivets are fastened at places where the stitching of your jeans is under the most
stress – around your pockets, and the crotch.
• The rivets were patented by Levi Strauss in the 1800s, and have been a mainstay in
jeans ever since.
6 – Loops on the back of shirts • If you look at the back of a man's button-down
shirt, there's a fair chance you'll find a small loop between the shoulders.
• That's a shirt loop, and it's for hanging the shirt on a hook, because that's way easier
than using a wire hanger.
• This started out as a functional design for sailors who were changing clothes on a
ship in the 1960s.
But the design quickly made its way to land, and never really left.
5 – Tire tread wear bars • This is something you'd probably never
notice if you don't spend time looking at car tires.
• But those tires have a way of telling you when they're starting to wear down and
need to be replaced.
• When the tread on those tires starts to run low, you'll start to see “wear bars”
appear as horizontal lines running across the grooves in the tread.
• If you see more than a couple of these in your tires, it might be time to think about
getting some new tires.
4 – Lines on solo cups • Maybe you've heard this one before – the
lines on a Solo cup correspond to different alcohol measurements.
• The top line is 12 ounces, the serving size for beer.
The middle line is 5 ounces for wine, and the bottom line is 1 ounce for alcohol.
• Of course, while those may be accurate and helpful measurements, the Dart Container
corportation – the makers of the Solo cup – say the lines are just there for performance,
and the measurements are coincidental.
• Which makes sense, because who drinks just one ounce of ANYTHING out of a Solo cup?
3 – Lumps on your power cables • If you've taken a look at a laptop computer's
charging cable, or a monitor cable, or any number of similar cords, you've probably seen
one of these.
• But like, what IS this thing?
Why is there a big lump at the end of your cord?
• Put simply, it's called a ferrite bead, and it's a small metallic cylinder that helps
to reduce electromagnetic interference between devices.
• That interference, for the record, is the reason you have to turn your cell phone
off on a plane.
And the ferrite bead is the reason your screen doesn't flicker like crazy when your phone
is nearby.
2 – Black dots on windshields • Around the outside of nearly every car
windshield, there is a band of black dots in various sizes.
Maybe at some point, you've wondered to yourself what the hell that's there for.
• The black band surrounding a windshield is an enamel paint meant to protect the adhesive
holding your windshield in place from UV deterioration.
• The dots surrounding it are there to hide the adhesive, and give a pleasing transition
from the black edge to the clear glass.
• They also provide some sun protection, and help provide even heat distribution to
the glass to keep it from distorting. 1 – Nintendo Switch cartridges
• For whatever reason, one of the first things people did when the Nintendo Switch
came out is start licking the cartridges.
• They were not terribly pleased with the results.
• Because Switch cartridges are so small, they represent a choking hazard for small
children.
• Nintendo was concerned about this and so have coated the cartridges with a non-toxic,
but foul-tasting substance, to hopefully encourage kids to spit them out if they get that far.
• The same substance is used to discourage people from biting their fingernails.